The Open Source Maintenance Fee is more than a year old now - how are things going? Carl and Richard catch up with Rob Mensching to discuss the OSMF and its success in supporting Rob's WiX Toolset project. Rob talks about the key aspect of the OSMF - making it part of the licensing, so that it isn't optional. Of course, you can download the source from GitHub and compile it yourself without violating any license terms, but if you're that engaged, you can contribute too. The goal with OSMF is to have folks who want to use the product have a reason and method to pay - check it out!

Have you checked out Azure Container Apps lately? Carl and Richard talk to Paul Yuknewicz and Jan Kalis about how they have sped up startup time with Container Apps using a feature called Express, and then on to the big news - Sandboxes. Sandboxes let you experiment with Azure Container Apps with managed identity to access Azure Connectors to all sorts of resources, both within Azure and outside it - Salesforce, SAP, etc. It's an effective and secure strategy for building applications, but also for experimenting with agents - at no point does the agent actually have control of any credentials. If you haven't looked at ACA lately, you need to check out these latest features!

DNSimple has a CLI! Carl and Richard talk to DNSimple CEO Anthony Eden about the evolution of the DNSimple CLI in today's software market. DNSimple provides DNS, domain registrar, and certificate services - so why does it need a CLI? Anthony talks about earlier experiments with CLIs for folks who didn't want to use the web interface. But today, large language models change the game and work best with a CLI - those specific commands mean more accurate results from LLMs, which make for a powerful natural language interface experience. The conversation covers the new tooling around LLMs, how the registrar market has evolved, changes to certificates, and ICANN's recent announcement of new gTLDs. DNSimple continues to evolve with the times! Check the show notes for a link for ten dollars off anything at DNSimple!

Do data centers in space make any sense? Time for a rare summer-time Geek Out! Richard chats with Carl about all the hype surrounding building orbital data centers for AI workloads. Richard points out that enthusiasm for this idea surged in the fall of 2025, when the backlash against ground data centers peaked. But could you actually make the orbital data centers work? The conversation works through a reasonable satellite design, covering off the details of power, cooling, communications, and satellite management. But how many satellites would be enough? This leads to an exploration of Kessler Syndrome, where orbital debris gets out of control - and what we can reasonably do about it. Which leads to another idea - how do we make ground-based data centers not suck?

Can tooling make event sourcing implementations easier? Carl and Richard talk to Einar Ingebrigsten about his work on cratis.io - a set of open-source tools for implementing event sourcing in your application. Einar discusses the foundational elements of event sourcing and the common implementation patterns he developed at Cratis. With extensive support for .NET, Cratis provides tooling for data storage, event response, replay management, and much more. Also in development is Cratis Studio for collaborating visually on an event model - and generating the code in the process.

Is it time to build your own agent harness? Carl and Richard talk to Emmz Rendle about her work on Daemonic AI, which gives you more control over which models and tooling you use to build software with agents. Emmz talks about the upcoming rug pull in AI software development tools, where prices are rising, and services are being restricted. Having enough control to choose when to run locally becomes key to being productive at a reasonable price. Being able to pick-and-choose what agents and configurations to use for each of the agent roles you want to implement is super powerful - check out the GitHub project and take it for a spin!

What settings, configurations, and workflows do you use for every .NET app? Carl and Richard talk to Scott Sauber about his list - from organizing folders by feature, to logging, security, and testing. Scott talks about enforcing rules like treating warnings as errors so you won't ignore important warnings, and validation in the build, to make applications more reliable. Each of these items represents some work, but in the end, your application will be higher quality and more reliable. Which ones are you already doing?

Large Language Models can generate a lot of text - but is it any good? Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about his ongoing efforts at pWin.ai to build tools for responding to government RFPs. Vishwas focuses on the quality problem - both the quality of the incoming RFP and the quality of the responding proposal. How do you determine the key requirements of an RFP reliably? And when it comes to the response, how do you provide measurable results for a response? The conversation digs into a change in workflow that benefits the RFP process regardless of tooling - and gives hints to the patterns of success with LLMs!

Use What Works! Carl and Richard talk to Dylan Beattie about the Use What Works movement, encouraging developers to use well-maintained open-source projects available today rather than rolling their own. Dylan explains how folks go down a path of believing a library is simple until they learn enough to realize that every bit of software is more complicated than they realize. And the less code you own, the happier and more productive you are. Adding AI to the mix only makes it clearer: you need some stability in development. If you're changing every layer of code, you'll spend even more time and frustration chasing problems. Make getting results easier - use what works!

Ready to go nano? Carl and Richard talk to José Simões about the open source .NET nanoFramework - a community-driven project to provide .NET for embedded systems. José talks about the evolution from the .NET microFramework, to something even smaller, while at the same time, microcontrollers have gotten much more powerful. The conversation looks beyond the hobbyist and educational uses of these systems into commercial IoT applications. The development cycle is one you'll recognize, working in Visual Studio (or Visual Studio Code) and executing against an emulator, or to the actual controller via USB. And yes, you can set breakpoint in the controller!